Archive for Jul 23, 2008

Yet another home media option from Samsung, this time aiming to connect your shiny new LCD or plasma TV up to your media center PC. The Samsung MediaLive is an extender that brings the Vista Media Center to your HDTV screen; that means you can watch recorded or downloaded media, pause live TV and also watch live high-definition programming via a CableCARD tuner.

If your TV tastes swing a little larger than their new Touch of Color monitors, Samsung have just the larger screens for you. Unveiling its holiday lineup of Series 6 through 9 LCD and plasma HDTVs, the company has extended Touch of Color throughout as well as adding features such as compatibility with USB flash drives and RSS for on-screen news and weather updates.

Samsung’s latest Touch of Color LCD monitors have finally launched, three months after the first two reached the market. Intended for your desk yet offering a TV distraction courtesy of the built-in ATSC / ClearQAM tuner, the T240HD and T260HD both offer full 1080p on 24-inch and 26-inch panels respectively.

If you're still on the lookout for speakers to fit your style, these slim little guys attach directly to your iPod. Making it so that you can easily keep your music on you at all times and have less cords dangling in your way.

Cars, especially new ones that sit on the lot have a tendency to kill batteries. Which is due to all of the embedded electronics that suck juice even when the car isn’t in use. Well for car dealers it can become a bit of a nuisance to have to replace batteries all the time.

Therefore Nissan has decided to use ICP solar chargers just for that purpose. They will be sending them to the Nissan dealers in North American and Europe.

If you have a thing for the designer Betsey Johnson, then Best Buy has a new line of gadget accessories you might be interested in. It features several different styles and sizes of cases to fit all of your small electronics.

They not only have several iPod cases, but a camera, phone and set of laptop cases as well. All three of the laptop bags will hold a laptop up to 15.4”. The iPod cases will hold either the Touch or the Classic. It doesn’t seem that they have any to fit the Nano.

The camera has both a small and medium size, whereas the phone cases will fit most smaller phones. The prices range from about $20 all the way up to $140. The camera cases happen to be cheaper than usual as of now.

The options for compact desktop computers based on Intel’s power-sipping Atom processor keep increasing, with Korean company Ripple being the latest to throw their hat into the ring. Based on the Mini-ITX form factor, the new Ripple Mini Chocolate measures just 15 x 210 x 80mm and has a 1.6Ghz Atom CPU, up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM and space for a slot-loading optical drive.

Canon have announced new camcorders in its iVIS range, which can record in the AVCHD format to either solid-state or hard-drive based storage. The iVIS HF11 comes with 32GB of onboard flash memory, while the iVIS HG21 has a 120GB HDD; both also include an SDHC card slot. Each uses a 3.31-megapixel CMOS sensor and has 12x optical zoom.

Cowon seem to be carving a good niche for themselves with good-design and, judging by the reviews, superlative audio quality. As such, it’s always nice to see a new model from the company, and the P5 PMP just announced in Korea doesn’t disappoint. Packing a 5-inch, 16.7m color 800 x 480 touchscreen, two versions – the P5 and the P5 Study – will be available; the former has T-DMB radio and Bluetooth.

Aigo’s Hong Kong arm have revealed pricing and release information for their Mobile Internet Device (MID). The compact touchscreen-equipped P8860 will go on sale on August 8th 2008 (the first day of the Beijing Olympics) to Hong Kong buyers, carrying a HK$5228 (US$670) tag.

Working on the principle that there can never be too many touchscreen Eee variants, jkkmobile has a new tutorial for adding such a panel to the ASUS Eee PC 901. The 8.9-inch touchscreen panel itself costs around $70 on eBay (plus shipping); then it’s just a case of opening up the 901, locating power and USB connections, and carefully squeezing everything in.

Analysts seem to be the most bored people on the planet, so instead of picking up a few video games and doing something constructive, they make predictions. The latest and greatest is that the computer mouse will be dead in five years.

Instead of a mouse they are predicting we’ll be using things like facial recognition systems, multi-touch and devices like OCZ’s mind-reading Neural Interface Actuator. I’m sorry but I really truly don’t want to be sitting at my computer looking like this guy.